We have an old poweredge 2950 that's making some interesting noises, and I noticed our rack had a r710 that used to have our main file server on it but was migrated off. Powered on, still had the old file server sticker on it, forgotten about for weeks.

I've spent last week cleaning up the list of servers, and killing off any we didn't need anymore.

Dropped some 12 virtual machines, and we pulled some 7 physical machines out of the racks. All were shut down for over a couple of months already.

Updated our list of servers, so we now have an accurate list of what's in the racks, what it's called, it's purpose, virtual or physical, whether it's part of the backup and even when the last run of updates was let loose on the machine.

Man that sounds nice. We only have like 6 or 7 servers but it'd feel good to clean the old stuff out. A few of my servers live on tables (semi-production servers). One nice thing about where my stuff is, is that we have like no real natural disasters, unless the dam above the city broke. No tornados, no hurricanes, no typhoons, and luckily, no cockroaches either.

Got to work today just in time for the power to go out. Storm in the Bay area too. KVM wouldn't work so grabbed a monitor to shut down the stubborn vhost. Power came up and I had to scratch my head a bit to figure out what all to power up. A few old servers in the rack I need to get rid of. Rack clean up and relabeling moves up the list.

Reminds me of the server I dutifully installed updates on every week. Then an update caused it to crash, and crash unrecoverably. It was then that we realized the only thing it was doing was DHCP. It was easier to move that service to another server than to recover the crashed server.

I have a saying: if you don't know what something does, unplug it and see who hollers.

I still have 3 Apple XServe G4s running legacy apps here. I don't know exactly what I am going to do when another one fails. I have lost two already and had two spares on hand. I would migrate this except it is hardware specific and will not run on newer Intel based Macs, only the older processors.

Tim, I'm down in PDX, adn we're expecting the 60mph gusts between tonight and tomorrow night. I know the fear.

The building I'm in has such shitty power that I'm half tempted to schedule an auto shutdown at 7pm and not worry about anything until Monday.

I'm up in Longview, WA (about 35 miles N. of PDX) -- we're preemptively shutting down a bunch of our customers' servers & networks this evening, planning to bring them up after the storm passes.

Thought we were going to lose power this morning when a T-storm rolled through.

Well, the big storm turned out to be a blowhard. There were a few downed trees and scattered power outages, but nothing like they were warning could have happened.

What did happen was the storm turned and moved up the coast a few more miles offshore than predicted, and it split into two low pressure centers. That made all the difference between a storm of the century and a storm of the month.

So was it worth it to turn down the non-mission-critical systems when hindsight says they would have stayed up? Of course it was. A prediction is just a prediction, not a promise. Those scattered power outages could have been scattered right where the servers were.

Will we do the same for the next big storm that's predicted? Yes, we will.